EMINENT AUTHORESS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26618, 14 November 1947, Page 5

EMINENT AUTHORESS

BARONESS ORCZY DEAD CREATOR OF “PIMPERNEL” SERIES Rec. 8 p.m. LONDON, Nov. 12. The death is announced of Mrs Montague Barstow, the Baroness Emmuska Orczy, authoress of the famous “ Scarlet Pimpernel ” novels.

Baroness Orczy was born in Hungary in 1865. Her early studies were made in Brussels and Paris before enrolling at the Heatherley School of Art in London. Some of her pictures were hung at the Royal Academy, but it was as a novelist that she is most widely known. In 1905 she published a play, “ The Scarlet Pimpernel,” which introduced her most famous character, Sir Percy Blakeney. A novel of the same name was published the same year, and the two introduced a long series of popular “ Pimpernel ” successes. A long list of romantic fiction, extending virtually to the present time, has kept the Baroness’s name before

the public, but she never quite duplicated the success of the early “ Pimpernel ” adventures. Her latest novel was “ Mam’zelle Guillotine,” published in 1940.

She was the only child of Baron Felix Orczy, a composer and conductor of some note, and Emma Orczy, formerly the Comtesse Wass. As a child she knew Wagner, Liszt, Gounod, and Massenet, friends of her father. Though she spoke no word of English until she was 15, all her writings are in that language. It was at the London Art School that she met her husband. Montagu Barstow. the son of an English clergyman. Their son and only child. John Montague Orczy Barstow, born in 1899, has been professor of English at Lausanne and writes under the name of “ John Blakeney ’’—the derivation of which will be obvious to all readers of his mother’s romances. Never more than a “ popular novelist,” Baroness Orczy at her best has nevertheless contributed genuine excitement and entertainment to her craft.